The Return: A Novel (2 page)

*   *   *

Now Marder’s finger brought up the contact list on his cell phone but hesitated above the next necessary number. Time for some procrastination. He went to the closet in the loft’s bedroom and pulled out a battered leather gladstone bag of Mexican manufacture. He had not used it in some time, for now he traveled with a black nylon roll-aboard like the rest of humanity, but he thought that this one was the right container for his truncated new life. Into it went lightweight shirts and trousers, the usual underwear and toilet articles, a linen jacket and a leather one, leather sandals, several softly worn bandannas, a real Panama straw hat, the kind you could roll up. He hung his best suit in a garment bag, providing for any formal event or to be buried in. He placed the packed bag at the foot of his bed and then opened a tall, narrow steel safe.

Marder was not exactly a gun nut. He disliked the policies of the National Rifle Association and thought the general availability of powerful semiautomatic weapons in his nation was insane, but, despite that, he liked guns. He admired their malign beauty as he admired tigers and cobras, and he was a wonderfully proficient shot. From his gun safe he brought out a rifle and two pistols, together with all the boxes of ammunition he had on hand. It was irrational, he knew, but he did not want his survivors to have to dispose of them. Besides, it was always convenient to be armed on road voyages through the regions of Mexico where he intended to travel. He asked himself why he cared, since the thing in his head was more or less in charge of his life. Mr. Thing, as he now decided to call it, had its own agenda. Mr. Thing could discharge him from his life without notice, but in the meantime he would remain Marder, although a Marder who would not be an occasion of pain to the people he cared about.

In furtherance of this goal, he now placed himself at his computer and shopped for a truck, for he did not want to fly commercial, which could be traced. It took him only half an hour to arrange for the purchase of a Ford F-250 fitted with a seven-foot hardwall Northstar camper, model name “Freedom,” which Marder thought pretty amusing under the circumstances. The seller was in Long Island City, and Marder made an appointment to pick it up late that day. Another call to Bernie: courier a check over to the dealership. This time Bernie did not ask questions.

*   *   *

Marder spun on his chair and looked around the office, reflecting that he’d spent an extraordinary amount of time within these walls. Two of them, the ones in view of his desk, were painted eggshell. Set into one of these was the big industrial-scale window looking out on Worth Street. Behind him, the rear wall of the room and the remaining sidewall were painted bloodred. That had been Chole’s section of the home office. He had his elegant steel-and-rosewood desk, his back-saving leather chair, infinitely adjustable with little wheels and levers. Her desk was the antique rolltop with pigeonholes he’d bought her for their fifth (or wooden) anniversary. She had used a wooden office chair she’d brought in from the sidewalk in the days of their poverty, its cushion upholstered in bright serape cloth. Above her desk, a broad section of the wall was covered in thick cork panels, on which she’d stuck family photos, posters, found objects, cartoons, newspaper and magazine clippings from the Mexican press. The report of the murder of her father and mother, for example. A photograph of Esteban de Haro d’Ariés, that father, when young and smiling and holding his daughter, aged four, for example.

She’d been doing this for a long while, and the corkboard had become a palimpsest of her life in exile, untouched in the three years since her death. Marder had long since stopped looking at it closely but had a good look at it now. On one side of the cork hung a torero’s shining cape and on the other an enormous crucifix, its corpus gray-skinned, bloody, twisted, agonized, nailed to the rough wood of the cross with real iron nails. It looked as if it had been sculpted from life, and considering that it had come from Michoacán, it might have been. A lot of strange things happened down there, where she was from.

He removed the newspaper clipping about the murders. It had been torn roughly out of the pages of
Panorama del Puerto
, the newspaper in Lázaro Cárdenas; on it his wife had written lines from a poem by Octavio Paz on the occasion of the famous massacre of students in 1968. He translated it silently:

Guilt is anger

turned against itself:

if an entire nation is ashamed

it is a lion poised

to leap.

Maddened by grief—an antique concept perhaps, but Marder had seen it played out in this very dwelling, this room. No one had been punished for the murders, just another pair out of the forty thousand or so that the
narcoviolencia
had claimed. Everyone knew who had done it, and by all reports he was still enjoying his life, buoyed by an ocean of dollars and his apparent impunity. Marder carefully folded the clipping and placed it in a slot of his wallet, as if it were a set of a directions for the operations of a complex mechanism. A trap of some kind—no, an ambush: a lion poised to leap.

Marder had no corkboard. Instead, he had a whiteboard, inscribed in dry marker. It listed book schedules, chapter outlines, things to do. He took a rag and wiped it clean; so much for his life. A transient weakness passed through his body, and he had to sit in his chair for a moment and catch his breath. Then he turned to the file cabinets. His and hers: twin four-drawer wooden models. Hers was empty—the kids had cleared it out after she died. The upper three drawers of his contained his professional life: editorial notes, contracts, and so on, most of them from years ago, before the world turned digital. A good proportion of the paperwork was in Spanish because, for the last ten years or so, Marder’s fluency in the language had led him into the business of arranging Spanish translations of works in English. For many big Latin American media firms, Marder was one of the go-to people in New York. No more, obviously.

He got a black forty-gallon trash bag from the kitchen and opened the top drawer. Out went the impedimenta of former labors, plus the financial stuff, old tax returns, business letters from before email arrived—rustling and thumping into the bag. The bottom drawer held more-personal papers. Here was an old-fashioned red cardboard file marked
RICHARD
on the index tab in his mother’s parochial school cursive.

He flipped it open. It contained his birth and baptismal certificates, report cards, school awards, a collection of handmade Mother’s Day and birthday cards of increasing competence, right up through his elementary school years, until he had money enough to buy from Hallmark. Then there were the letters he’d sent from his time in the military, scrawled in ballpoint on cheap PX stationery, several smeared with the red soil of Vietnam. He recalled the ones she’d sent him in return, one every few days: quotidian cheerfulness, a recounting of prayers she’d sent up from St. Jerome’s for his safety, and, unconventionally, a series of commentaries about the Catholic antiwar movement, of which Katherine Devlin Marder had been an ornament. He didn’t know where those letters were and felt a pang of regret.

A thin file was marked
DAD
in Marder’s own neat capitals. This contained a sheaf of papers from Augie Marder’s own military service in the Good War. Here was the honorable discharge in a tattered, yellowing envelope printed with the army seal. He’d been with the Sixth Army under MacArthur, in New Guinea and the Philippines, that grim, inglorious campaign of which no movie with major stars had yet been made, of which his father had hardly ever spoken. He’d been leg infantry all the war long, discharged as a corporal with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star. That had been one of the only two pieces of advice he’d offered when his son had gone off to the Less Good War: stay out of the goddamn infantry. Marder had followed it, had entered the air force to beat the draft, but, ignoring the other piece of advice (never,
never
volunteer!), had ended up in an outfit compared to which the leg infantry in New Guinea was a day at the beach.

There were also pension papers, union papers, canceled savings passbooks, a couple of yellowing photos with deckle edges: a stringy young man, bare-chested, smiling by a howitzer, jungle in the background; the same man, now unsmiling, with two others of the same age, in their liberty duds, on some dusty street, three of the legion of teenagers who had destroyed the empire of Japan. And an insurance policy, the word
PAID
punched through it in tiny holes.

His father had been no fool. He’d known what happened to men who spent their whole working lives punching out hot type, sitting next to pots of molten, fuming lead. All linotypers died nuts, he used to say; he even joked about it, until it stopped being funny, until the rages and paranoia ate up the decent workingman he’d been and he’d died at sixty, raving, in a state hospital. But he’d taken advantage of the insurance program run by his union and never missed a payment, and after his death came the astonishing letter and the check for $550,000, of which a hundred fifty grand was Marder’s. The rest went to his mother, and it turned out to be just enough to pay for the best possible care during the following year, the final year of her life.

Another, much fatter file, marked
APPLE STUFF
on a machine-made label. It contained decades of broker’s statements. They wanted to send them over the computer now, but Marder liked the paper in his hands. He looked at the latest one: the balance was a colossal, an unbelievable sum, forty times more than his father had earned in a lifetime of noisy, filthy, deadly toil. And all Marder had done to earn it was to walk into a Merrill Lynch office one day on his lunch hour, knowing nothing about stocks but having seen the famous
1984
commercial during a drunken Super Bowl party, and use his insurance money to buy thirty-five thousand shares of Apple, Inc., at $3.22 per share. And he’d held on to it, feeling stupid for decades as the stock stayed flat, dipped, rose, dipped again, but clinging to his faith, until the technology had blossomed in recent years, sending the stock into financial heaven and making him a multimillionaire. Dumb luck, yes, but Marder also thought of it as the Linotyper’s Revenge.

The Apple file went into the trash, but he returned
RICHARD
and
DAD
to the drawer, for the kids to find. He thought of these as a part of their family history, no longer his to destroy. There were files marked with the children’s names too, Carmel and Peter, although the Peter one was empty. His son had taken all his stuff out of the loft after his mother died, the circumstances of Chole’s death having estranged father and son, and Marder no longer had any hope that they’d ever connect again. For a moment he thought of calling his son and, presuming Peter would even take the call, telling him about the medical thing and … and what? I’m dying; you have to forgive me for what happened with your mother? No. He’d screwed up and he’d have to take the fall. Carmel was a different story. He could call
her
. Not to tell her the truth, of course.

Before he could chicken out again, he grasped his cell phone and touched her name. A couple of shaky rings sounded, and when the call went to voice mail he felt a shameful relief. He knew she’d call back as soon as she was free of whatever consuming thing she was into at the moment. She was like her mother in that regard. Peter however, was like Marder—cool, cerebral, a harborer of grudges. While he waited for her callback, he turned to his computer and went to a website for a firm called Su Hacienda. It was a property agency that sold villas and estates to wealthy Americans who wanted to vacation or retire in Mexico and bask in the sunshine and the plenitude of cheap servants. There were a number of such agencies, but for Marder’s purpose only one would do. He took the phone number from the website and dialed a number he hadn’t called in three years.

He felt sweat flow in his armpits, on his forehead, while he listened to the ring.

“Hello, Su Hacienda, Nina speaking.” A wonderful throaty voice, slightly accented; this had been the first attraction.

“Nina, this is Rick.”

A pause on the line, a crackling etheric hiss in his ear. He could imagine the small solo office with the framed pictures of properties, and he could imagine
her
, although he didn’t want to, for she was the one pathetic infidelity of his long married life, an affair of six weeks.

During the last of which his wife had mixed up an unusually powerful version of her usual cocktail of prescription drugs and tequila, after which it had seemed good to her to climb to the roof of this very loft building, remove her clothes, and go dancing alone on the parapet, in a driving snowstorm. She’d landed in the air shaft and been covered by the drifts, had lain there for the better part of a week, a period during which he was with Nina Ibanez, in one of her properties south of Acapulco, screwing his brains out.

Amazement in her voice. “Rick
Marder
?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

A chuckle. “Well. Someone I never thought I’d hear from again. It’s been years.”

“Yes. Look, Nina, I want to buy a property.”

Another pause. “Ah, Rick … if you want to see me, you don’t have to buy a property. A drink will do.”

“No, it’s not about that, us. I really want to buy a property, a house, a nice one, isolated, on the coast. You know, as a getaway.”

“You’re not thinking of
that
house, are you? Because it’s been sold, and it’s not on the market as far as I know.”

“No, I don’t want it in the Acapulco area. I want to buy a house with a good chunk of property in Playa Diamante.”

“Playa…? You mean Playa Diamante in
Michoacán
?”

“Yeah. Do you have anything? I need it sort of now.”

Dead air on the line, for so long that Marder thought the system had dropped the call.

“Hello?”

When she spoke, her voice was chillier, more businesslike and precise.